Jeremy Renner covers the August issue of Esquire, because dear God he really needs The Bourne Legacy to be a big hit. Even a modest hit would be good, but it really needs to make money. I think it will! I think people still have affection for the Bourne films, and those are the people willing to see Jeremy Renner try to take over the franchise. While I’m not really in love with the Esquire photo shoot, it’s not actively bad or anything. The interview, on the other hand, is a concerto of crazy. And it’s not even Jeremy – Jeremy Renner always strikes me as a nice enough dude. Kind of tough, kind of funny, a loyal friend and only a little bit crazy. Crazy in the way the average person is “a little crazy.” I think Jeremy’s “slight insanity” is that he draws mentally imbalanced people out. Crazy seeks him out. I’m not talking “Twihard crazy” either. I’m talking about a 60-something male stalker who followed Jeremy around (before he was famous!!!) and ended up abducting Jeremy’s cat. FOR REAL.

[Renner] was living in this apartment when he got his first significant part, in 2002, playing the true-life cannibal serial killer in Dahmer. It was a small movie, shot quickly, but people who were drawn to it were really drawn to it. That’s when Renner first started being recognized on the street; unfortunately, it was by the sorts of people who might connect with a murderer who kept the heads of young men in his fridge.

The hot girl who bit Renner deep into his arm, sending him to the hospital for shots, was only his second-weirdest encounter with admirers. The weirdest was an older man, maybe in his sixties, who started popping up a little too often in the places Renner hung out back then: in the coffee shop around the corner, at the record store. The man kept saying, Gee, what a lucky thing this is, running into each other like this, maybe it’s a sign, maybe we should go get a drink, and Renner always demurred, never really thinking all that much more about the guy and his repeated appearances.

It wasn’t until the man showed up outside Renner’s apartment that the truth began to register. Renner was walking his dog, and the man bumped into him: Here we are again, can you believe it? Do you live around here? Renner said, Oh, no, just walking the dog. Once again, the man asked Renner to go for a drink. And this time, when Renner said thanks but no thanks, the man got upset. He started yelling. Renner hustled away, walking his dog all through those streets, around corners and behind hedgerows, blocks out of his way, before he finally decided he had lost the man, and he returned to his home.

He was sitting at his computer when he heard a noise outside on his patio. It was a coffee mug, crashing to the ground. Renner thought his dog or maybe his cat — he had a cat then named Milo — had knocked it over. He went outside to investigate. And there was the man. There was the man, and he had Milo in his hands. “He had my cat tucked like a football, under his arm,” Renner says, sitting in his Porsche all these years later. Renner was stunned, frozen in a kind of low-level shock. The man bolted into the street. Renner gave chase, but before he could catch him, the man jumped into a car and squealed away. The man was gone, and so was Milo. Renner never saw either of them ever again.

“I hope Milo had a good life,” he says today, firing his engine back up. “I hope he didn’t end up as that guy’s dinner.”

What the hell, right? Sure, maybe every celebrity has to deal with some insane stuff, but this is an incident that happened when Jeremy had only appeared in Dahmer. That’s it! And stuffed inside this Esquire piece, there are like a half-dozen more stories of crazy people that Renner interacts with. There’s the tour bus operator that Renner used to do karaoke with (“I used to hang out at karaoke bars all the time. It was the most fun you could have when you had no money. I went right here twice a week from 1995 until, like, 2002. Religiously.”), and my favorite, there’s the “mobile” yoga instructor who taught a class on Renner’s property (“Look, man, I don’t come onto your porch and start doing deep lunges,” Renner told them. “Get the f–k out of here.”)

But the Esquire story is nice, and it is worth a read. There’s a lot about Jeremy’s friendship with Kris Winters – Kris and Jeremy are in business together, renovating houses in LA. They’ve been doing it for more than a decade, and they make a really nice profit of it – so far they’ve renovated more than 15 homes and condos! Crazy. I kind of love Jeremy. I’m not sure if he should be my boyfriend, or if he should just renovate my house.

Yeah he did, it was a small terrier I think. If I remember rightly, the breed have a history of medical problems. French terrier? French bulldog/pug? I can’t quite remember.
Either way, I feel really bad for our little pocket rocket! What kind of psycho steals a pet? I hope nothing bad happened to it.
It’s nice to know he’s an animal lover I always thought that says a lot about a person.

So true! My husband and I have a philosophy about life and how we want to raise our child(ren): If we can raise him to do the right thing when no one is looking, and to be kind and compassionate to children, animals, and the elderly, and to work hard rather than believe he is special or entitled…we will have succeeded.

thats the part about celebs i really try to ignore because thinking about it makes me really uncomfortable.
after i read about jodie foster (a crazy stalker trying to kill reagan to impress her and another guy following her with a gun who then decided “she was too pretty to be shot”) i keep myself from read too much about celeb stalkers.

Yay, more Jeremy! Love him. He doesn’t seem to have much luck with pets though. I hereby selflessly offer to put on a collar and lounge around his house liked a pampered pet…
(…did I really just write that?)

Ummm… so there are conflicting reports and you somehow know which are true? It must be nice to be psychic. I guess we can all just dismiss the reports that came out a few days after the bar fight story. Yeah, you’re pretty rude, but hey, you’re all-knowing, so I guess the rest of us should cut you some slack.

I googled that story pretty well (hit the gay sites) and I didn’t see the boy hooker being beaten.

I heard some possible hooker procurer was beaten up but no hookers of either gender were hurt in the incident.

I do agree with you that that incident makes me less into him because men only go to Thailand for one reason – gay or straight, it doesn’t matter. They go there for the sex trade. Single men in Thailand just gross me out.

poor Milo… what a story. You’d like to think that the guy would revere the cat because he was linked to JR but then again… the guy sounded strange to put it mildly. My first thought was ‘did he put signs up to get the cat back,’ etc. but then you draw the guy out. Today with twitter and the internet I feel like maybe he could have found him. Interesting guy tho’. Definitely not a boring interview. Refreshing.

I fell out of love with him. Had been a fan of his since his first (big screen) movie, Primal Fear.

But all the shit that went down before, during and after The Incredible Hulk was released really made me reevaluate my “allegiance” to him. That was the last drop, enough was enough, yadda, yadda, yadda…and he lost a fan.

HA! I love Renner. As far as the cat goes-if someone abducted my cat I would chase after them with a kitchen knife and wouldn’t stop running until I caught them. That dude is a crazy-ass stalker and I just hope Milo is safe.

Guess I’ll have to start hitting up the range for shooting lessons? Boy, what we do for our kittehs!
Sadly, my kitty would likely go willingly, but only if you hold her correctly. She must be held like a baby, not like a football.

Yes that’s her Eve! She is a Scottish Fold. I know she’s not a rescue *hangs head* but I sort of feel like she is because we “rescued” her from a trailer park. I always regret that I didn’t get her brother as well
Anyway, like most Folds, she sits on her butt like that-it’s called “buddha pose”!

Eve-the kitty in my Gravatar is a kitty I was trying to adopt from the shelter. They had awesome pics of her on the ARL website. I got a little ahead of myself and sent the pics to friends with the subject line ” my new kitty!”. Alas, she was adopted by a couple that got there first That was probably an over-explanation but true story

Eve & OKitt – Isn’t funny how individually picky our kittehs are? I’ve had a couple who MUST be cradled, two shoulder-drapers, and the rest have been whatever they deemed appropriate at the time. One of them even crawls up my shirt sleeve or down my cleavage (whatever’s handy) at the groomers and the vet.

I’m loving that cat of yours, OKitt. And I totally feel you on that adoption you lost out on – I was sending pix out right and left of the Maine Coon I was rescuing, only to be shut down by the “he’s fine with other pets, but not your toddler” thing. I cried.

Me too! I don’t think I’m that intense but I swear I must emit some weirdo-come-at-me vibe because it happens all the time.

Thankfully no one has taken my dog. If that happened, it’d be like Taken. I will find them. Though I would be slightly impressed (and scared) they could carry a 65 lb dog under their arm like a football.

@KK – I have the small children and lonely old people vibe it seems. I was waiting for my car to have its oil changed and I immediately gained the attention of a small 4 yr old. She not only wanted to sit in my lap but play with my phone, my hair, my sunglasses, everything. Her mom was trying to deal with the mechanic and I was stuck in that awkward place of allowing it or deal with a potentially screaming child. Then the old man next to me proceeded to tell me his life story and how his daughter’s moving away. I swear, if only that power could be converted to pulling in attractive guys I’d be all set.

Me too! I get hit on a lot but it’s never flattering bc it’s all weirdos that probably hit on anything.
And for the last two days I’ve been stated at by groups of Hispanic men.
I’m terrified I’m going to end up raped and murdered one day!

I’m sorry, but how many hundreds of interviews/articles have we read where the celebrity spends an inordinate amount of time talking about his or her longtime close friend and then, stunningly, years later it turns out it was a relationship?

If somebody is a platonic friend, why would you constantly bring their name up in a huge interview?

How on earth did you get that from this article? He’s not talking *about* his friend, he’s talking about the business they run *together*. This insistence on making everybody in Hollywood gay is really strange.

I got it from reading all the way to the end of the post, and based on the fact that he brings this guy up in every single interview. Do you work your best friend’s name into every single conversation you have?

I don’t know or care whether everybody in Hollywood is gay; I just get tired of people who lie about it for years and then come out as if they’ve done something amazing.

I dunno, RobN. You could be right, but my best friend is like a soul mate, and we spend a ton of time together because we are both single at the moment, and also because we both love and accept each other unconditionally. We share the same spiritual path (NOT religious!) and have seen immense, growth, change, and healing in each other; things we have each shared with no one else because they wouldn’t understand. However, we are not sexual with each other AT ALL. No attraction, whatsoever, and it would be, in some ways, the awesomest thing in the world if there was. We’re just both strictly dickly, but love each other in every other way to the core. I don’t know what I would do or who I would be without her. Maybe Jeremy has just found a love like that. Either way, it’s fine.

“Do you work your best friend’s name into every single conversation you have?”

…I do, for the most part. Why wouldn’t I? We do damn near everything together and are like brain-twins. Plus she’s hilarious. So I have plenty of reason for her to come up.

I don’t give a rat’s ass if he’s gay or not, but the idea that people can’t be close with someone without it being inherently sexual is truly bizarre. There’s a very long history of that kind of relationship between people. You should see the saucy letters women were writing each other in the Victorian era.

How many ways do I love this man? I sound like a broken record but he’s got to be my favourite celebrity right now. The story about his cat is creepy and tragic but on the whole, the article was really great. I love that he wasn’t sitting around waiting for his big break, he went out and became successful in another area of work. That’s great. Gaining stardom at a relatively older age means he has a whole lot of perspective he might not have otherwise had. Must be a pretty priceless in a place like Hollywood. Can’t wait for The Bourne Legacy.

If someone abducted my cat, I would go all Liam Neeson on their ass. I’d seek them out, they better sleep with one eye open. And didn’t Jeremy catch the dude’s licence’s plate? Argh, what a terrible story.

How can he sell the Bourne movie if the world now knows he could not catch a 60 yr. old cat-napper. And after that, he was all “Meh, bye Milo”? Seriously, that is NOT an animal lover. People that love their furry children would have filed a police report and tracked the creep down.

This story is eating me up more than the Holmes/Cruise one (and owning my crazy catlady-ness in the process).

We all know that. And nobody said he should have chased down a car — there was no need to be sarcastic.

The point we’re making is that he could have taken note of the license plate number (and/or filed a police report), tracked the man down, offered a reward for the cat…but it doesn’t seem he did any of these things.

To lighten the mood, does anyone else find it hilarious that the girl who bit him is described as “hot”? So basically when he tells this story he must describe her as the “hot girl”, and he somehow recalls that she was hot even though he had to go to the hospital for shots? He is crazy, I love him!

Good lord, how horrible…. poor kitty! If I were Jeremy I’d so be hunting that creep down with a trusty bodyguard or two – and I’d make sure he had his ass beaten into the ground. You don’t mess with a person’s pets!

That’s awful! And he sounds like a kind, hard-working guy. Next time we rag on Kate Winslet for not giving in to every fan’s whim, let’s recall that it’s on a spectrum of needy, entitled (to scary) fan behaviour, and no one should HAVE to participate in any of that.

Still, onscreen Renner’s is the face and charisma of a second-banana character actor. I wish him well, but I’m annoyed that he will be ruining the next Bourne and MI movies for me.

I will look forward to half-glancing at them on MovieTime in a year or two.

I feel terrible for the cat. If the guy was a Dahmer “fan” then the cat was probably killed, skimmed and eaten.
It does sound as if he was a Dahmer fan since he kept trying to get Jeremy to go for a drink (to probably drug him like Dahmer did)

Why Can’t People Just Leave Him Alone, Seriously, Let Me Tell You The Honest Truth…Okay, Mr.Renner Is Not Gay As Some People Suggest, He Is Not An Alcoholic, Everybody Likes A Drink Every Now Again And That Counts For Almost Every Normal Actor You Say Is An Alcoholic…You Wouldn’t Have Any Of This Assumption In My Day, Its Disgusting how people can just assume something and then its called the truth when clearly it is not the case, so to conclude, lay off Mr.Renner, And Stop Being Absolute Snobbish, Pompous , Brats, Just Because You Have The Internet, Doesn’t Mean You Have The Right To Bitch About People. -JD